A Quick Fiasco

   

 

    A QUICK FIASCO Valerie O'Riordan

[first published in Fugue, Issue 48, June 2015 (ISSN 1054-6014)]

 

 

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Eddie was late,  weaving through the rally towards us, a plastic headlamp strapped to his forehead so that his swivelling neck threw a spotlight first over me, and then over Shaz, the pair of us shoving and batting a clipboard between us as if it were a court summons. ‘Just fucking take it, Conn,’ she was snapping, when Ed interrupted: ‘Conn, mate, I’m in serious trouble here.’ Shaz swung round to survey him. ‘Oh, for Christ’s sake,’ she said, ‘he’s half cut already! Yous two are meant to be helping!’ ‘Oy,’ I went, ‘we are helping.’ Eddie blinked at me. Unstrapped the lamp. So, he was a little ragged: a late-night pallor about the cheeks, though it wasn’t quite eight; the eyes puffy; the breath and suit jacket smelling of lager and garlic. All the same: ‘We’re here, aren’t we?’ I said. ‘That’s all I promised—that we’d, like, be here. And I have been helping.’ All month I’d been littering the city with her flyers, slapping posters in the windows of the shops I’d been fitting, thumbing stickers onto bus-shelters and lampposts. And here we were—here we all were, thousands of punters, the grunts and the flakes, workers and union leaders, all decked with fairy lights, toting ukuleles and rallying for LIGHTS   OUT,   an overnight march through the city and its suburbs, a revolutionary demo, and all of it organized, headed up, dreamt up by my wife. Shaz was the deputy Union head, the fixer—not me. I didn’t want to  

 

 

 

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thrust opinion polls at strangers; I didn’t want to belt out slogans. I’d said I’d walk; I’d said I’d round up support, and so here was Eddie; I hadn’t banked on fucking clipboards. ‘Chicken,’ I said, ‘listen. You’re strung out—’ Her lips retracted. Shoulders tensed. ‘Don’t you chicken me—’ I cupped a hand to my ear, pseudo-helplessly. Shouting, whistles, Marley on the PA, a tinny, exhausted beat, and, now, one of Shaz’s co-agitators—Steve something, goatee, corduroy—was on the P.A., drowning her out. He’d clambered onto the makeshift two-by-four stage at the front of the Sainsbury’s carpark and was bellowing into the loudspeaker: ‘Whose city?’ The mob bawled back, ‘Our city!’ Shaz was going, ‘—need to know who’s here, don’t I? It’s a bloody opinion poll, Conn, it’s just tick-boxes, you just hold it out. I mean, you could at least pretend you give a shit—Jesus!’ Her phone had started to bleat. ‘What? Oh, Terry. Yes, yes, of course—’ Handset pressed to her face, she thrust the sheaf of petitions at me, the clipboard’s sharp corner a mean gut-jab. Stupidly, I grabbed it—and she was off. Eddie was saying, ‘—like, properly fucked, Conn.’ ‘Yeah,’ I muttered, ‘fucked, right.’ I was thinking, screw her, my heart jerking maniacally. Up on stage, Union Steve had given way to a man in pink Lycra demonstrating warm-up exercises. Everybody around me was doing callisthenics: pensioners side-stepping, a fat white man in luminous cycling gear waggling his chubby arms and legs, pulling his ankles up behind him, one by one, legs quivering like a tankedup flamingo, his gut slopping. Screw her. We’d reached this bewildering point, Shaz and me, where tenderness had flipped into resentment. Nights after work, I’d get back from Eddie’s, and she’d be sitting up scrutinizing pension disputes or the minutiae of the anti-discrimination employment laws; we’d sidle past each other in silence. I didn’t know what I ought to be doing about it, or if I  

 

 

 

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ought to be doing anything about it at all. She still had that same sweet curve, the slender hands and the dirty smile, but she was strung tight as catgut, and it made my eyes water. ‘I mean, what am I supposed to do,’ Eddie went, ‘smash the bloody door in and get down on me knees?’ I looked at him. ‘Smash the door in? What?’ ‘Jesus,’ he said, ‘are you even listening? Emily’s—kicked—me—out.’ ‘Like fuck, she has. What’ve you done?’ ‘Nothing!’ He scowled. ‘Or, well, nothing new.’ A pause. ‘Paulette, like, called her up.’ ‘And—’ ‘And! And what do you think, and.’ ‘Ah,’ I said, ‘right.’ Paulette was Eddie’s sister-in-law—his wife, Emily’s, sister—and, about a year back, he’d fucked her. I’d found them pawing drunkenly at each other in the corridor of our local snooker club, their clothes all rucked up, her damp hair sticking to his wet mouth. I’d steered Ed, wobbling, home, Paulette had fled back to London, and they hadn’t seen each other since. Emily had classed the radio-silence from Paulette’s Acton flat as further evidence of her sister’s general fecklessness, and while Eddie’s guilt had left him shifty, it wasn’t a shiftiness you’d easily distinguish from his typical irritability. ‘So,’ he said, ‘it’s like, she’s in therapy. And she’s exorcising her demons, or whatever, so she decides to confess. Em hears her out, you know, and hangs up. She calls me at work, and, man, she’s screaming. Fuck this, fuck that, she’s changing the locks—the works.’ ‘Shit.’ ‘I’m all, I’m sorry, love, I’m sorry, but she’s going, this is it, you prick! Can you believe it? You’re out, she says.’ ‘Well—’  

 

 

 

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‘She says she’s waking up. She says if I show my face she’ll have my balls. I mean, it’s my house, man! Can you fucking believe it?’ His breath was thick with hops and misery. ‘Uh.’ I plucked at the crotch of my trousers. Re-knotted the drawstring. ‘Well. It’s not like you, you know, did nothing.’ ‘Fuck you! It was a mistake! It was eleven months ago!’ ‘I know, like, but still—’ ‘Fuck you,’ he said, but then he was silent for a minute. ‘Oh Jesus, Conn, whatever. I apologised, is the thing—I kept on apologising, and she’s not listening, is she?’ ‘I know, but—hang on, man.’ On stage, the aerobics guru was jumping down; a woman wearing a sandwich board that read MARSHAL snatched up the megaphone and started shouting instructions: ‘Joggers LEFT, walkers RIGHT, nobody PUSH—’ Not a chance was I jogging. I elbowed Eddie towards the walkers, and we were funnelled through a large cardboard archway made of protest banners stapled together—NO IFS! NO BUTS! NO PUBLIC SERVICE CUTS!—to meet another marshal, who signalled everyone west onto Liverpool Street. In the sallow November streetlight, Eddie looked doleful, older than his forty-three years, hoary and exhausted. ‘So,’ I said, finally, ‘you think she means it? She’s really kicked you out?’ He shrugged. ‘Sounds like it.’ ‘And, what, you thought, I know, I’ll go ponce about on a fucking demo instead of going home and finding out?’ He laughed. A harrumphing, phlegmy snort. ‘I have to think, mate, don’t I? I have to get my head together.’ We walked on a few paces. Crossed a junction, fell into the long shade of the Industry museum. I thought about Emily. Eventually I said, ‘I could go over. If you like. Talk to her.’  

 

 

 

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‘You? What good would that do?’ I shrugged. ‘Well. It’s only—is she all right, do you think?’ He looked at me. ‘Is she all right?’ ‘Well. Yeah.’ ‘Jesus, Conn!’ ‘No,’ I said, flushing, ‘I just mean, if she’s that upset, maybe she needs somebody to, like, talk her down. Or whatever.’ ‘And that somebody’s you?’ ‘Well—’ ‘Listen to me, you fat fuck.’ He’d stopped walking. I stopped, too. Uneasy. The other protesters grumbled at us—a panting, flabby, trembling roadblock, a mere five hundred yards past the starting line. Eddie squinted at me. ‘You actually think I’m making excuses to your missus so that you can fuck off home? Sorry, Shaz, he’s taken up crisis counselling—didn’t he say?’ I relaxed. ‘Right. Okay.’ ‘Worry about your own marriage. Yeah? Never mind mine, fucking calamity that it is.’ ‘I said, okay.’ ‘I need to think. She needs to calm down, I need to think. All right? And you need to be a mate, and shut the fuck up.’ He unzipped his backpack. I glimpsed eight, or twelve, or maybe sixteen cans of assorted supermarket-branded lagers and ciders. He peeled two open, passed me one, re-zipped the bag and shouldered it. We drank. Solidarity. ‘I love her,’ he said. ‘That’s all it is. That’s all it fucking ever is.’ * Salford-bound. We traipsed out through a drift of discarded complimentary foil emergency blankets in their transparent plastic wrappers, dead jellyfish on the depthless tarmac. Yellow  

 

 

 

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street-lamps picking out the corpses as the shadow of the Imperial War Museum North slowly impaled us. Fat fuck, I thought, hypocritical bastard. At least I got out and about, up ladders, ripping off baseboards. Eddie was propped on his haunches all day, selling train tickets at Cleaverton Station—all he ever did to get his blood circulating was shuffle stiffly to the vending machine on the Stockport platform. Plus, he lashed his meals with grease—rashers and colcannon, buttery eggs—oh, and Christ! I recalled, with a nauseating lurch, that slithery concoction, goody, as he called it, his grandmother’s legacy: a slushy, sickly layering of bread and sugar and scalding milk that he spooned from a mug for his breakfast. Eddie lugged ill health about like rancid blubber. He had an ulcer, asthma and irritable bowels—at forty-three! I didn’t know how Emily stood it. When I imagined them fucking, he was crotchety as a camel in that narrow old house, dry and resentful in the dark. I touched my belly. My bulk wasn’t a sign of an oily, fatty diet, or laziness, or disease: it was natural. An under-appreciated bulwark. I caressed my paunch. It meant I was reliable. Appealingly regular. Tolerable, at least, no matter what Shaz might say, because, unlike Eddie, I’d fucked nobody’s sister, accidentally or otherwise. I was a fucking boulder. Meanwhile he blundered on, pale under the alcohol-induced rosiness, his shirt collar dark with sweat, looking miserable and so ridiculously ill-equipped for a long hike that I felt abruptly guilty, and angrier than ever with Shaz. I tried to match my pace to his, to stop scowling. By mile seven, though, I’d lost interest in Ed’s desolation. The anti-capitalists were going for it— ‘TORIES, TORIES, BIG FAT CATS, ‘THEY'VE TAKEN ALL OUR MONEY AND WE WANT IT BACK!’ —and I was suffering my own torments. Throbbing feet, stiff shoulders, roiling stomach cramps: when we reached the first pit stop, and Eddie crashed to the ground with a wordless cry  

 

 

 

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of relief, I pitched myself, almost weeping, into the nearest PortaLoo queue, which was shuffling forward in piddling, aching inches. When I finally gained access to the poky little cubicle, my dinner reappeared in painful liquid spurts—baked beans, a puréed Gregg’s cream cake. I sat there as long as I could, despite the smell and the rough plastic seat, ignoring the pounding and griping from the other desperados outside. When I finally stood to go, my knees had trouble regaining the vertical and my face looked terrible in the little wall-mirror, in the khaki half-light: zombie, I thought, sicko. Well, Eddie looked worse: I found him where he’d slumped on the muddy verge, glowering at his mobile phone, his fingers mashing the keypad. ‘It’s too fucking cold for this shit.’ ‘Do you want me to do it?’ ‘No! Yes—just, redial, can you?’ He stared over my shoulder at the little screen as I hit the call button twice. His face was cast in a sickly lime glow. The screen said EMILY, but she didn’t pick up. I could hear the electronic purr as it rang and rang and finally the message as it clicked through to voicemail. ‘This is Emily Hamilton; I’m not here right now—’ ‘Fuck! Stupid, goddamn, fucking useless machines!’ ‘Ed—’ I began, but he’d already stood up; he flung the phone to the ground, onto the hard concrete surface of the Stretford carpark, and stamped upon it. The plastic casing cracked and the screen splintered and went dark. Eddie kicked the phone and it skittered along the ground, the battery falling out, the winking shards of glass from the screen scattering, the ruined machine landing under the carriage of the chip-van parked beside the temporary septic tank. ‘Uh,’ I said. He was breathing very hard. ‘So, I, uh—that’s her maiden name, is it?’ ‘What do you think?’ There was a short silence, broken by Shaz calling out, ‘Conn! Conn!’  

 

 

 

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Checking up on me, hands on her hips. Baggy-eyed with fatigue, but with a caffeinated edge to her voice, she went, ‘So? Let’s see how it’s going.’ ‘How it’s—?’ I frowned, realizing a second too late that I’d misplaced her precious clipboard. Dropped it, laid it down, thrust it at some eco-warrior mutineer and then sloped off— I had no idea. ‘Uh—’ Drained as she was, my wife still had enough energy left to get crabby. ‘Christ,’ she exclaimed, ‘why do I ever expect anything else?’ ‘Oh, here we go! Everything’s always my fault.’ ‘But this is your fault! I need tonight to go well, Conn, I need the bloody paperwork! I’ve worked like a fucking navvy all year—’ ‘Don’t I know it! Can’t do this, can’t do that, be quiet—that’s all I’ve heard for months!’ ‘Oh, yeah?’ She folded her arms. ‘Well, I’m surprised you can hear anything at all from right the way down the road in his fucking wife’s kitchen.’ ‘What?’ I glanced quickly at Eddie. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ ‘You know exactly—’ ‘Um, Sharon? Terry’s here!’ A flustered volunteer in a skin-tight denim jacket, a man’s flat cap and a pair of oversized empty glasses-frames stood before us. ‘We can’t, like, keep her waiting.’ ‘Just a minute, Izzy,’ Shaz snapped. She jabbed an unsteady finger at me. Biro stains and hangnails. ‘You’re pathetic. You know that?’ ‘I’m pathetic?’ ‘Yes. Yes. And you know what? I don’t have time to deal with this right now. Izzy? Izzy!’ She stalked away, past the PortaLoos, marshals nodding at her, Izzy and the whole dewy-eyed, glow-in-the-dark, save-the-world brigade tripping along after her like Hamelin rats.  

 

 

 

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I wheeled around and bore down upon Eddie—still grinding his teeth, his chest heaving—and snarled, ‘So are we getting a fucking move on, then, or what?’ * Eight miles, then. Nine. Ten. Hours. Eddie refused to stop, to go home, and each step taunted my strained ligaments. I could barely stagger. The city—Manchester, my home—was nothing but a filthy, great, rucked-up carpet littered with trip-hazards to cripple me. I was shaking with cold and I wanted to vomit; I kept picturing silted-up, overworked arteries, wilting hearts contracting violently before cutting out, bulwark or not, and there were more than fifteen miles yet to go. Hauling myself from pothole to streetlamp, not for Shaz’s sake, but for Eddie’s, when, if he weren’t such an obstinate fucking lump, I could be at Emily’s side right now, instead of making soft, involuntary little noises of protest as the road tipped nastily up past the Universities and towards the Manchester Royal Infirmary— I folded away all thoughts of his wife—his beautiful fucking wife—and said, weakly, ‘Ed, man—it’s magic taxi time, hey?’ The hospital was where we’d first become mates. Eddie and me. Not because of illness or accident, but because of pure old tottering inebriation and near-arrest. ‘Ed,’ I repeated, ‘man. Look.’ ‘Huh?’ He looked at me blankly before the Victorian façade of the old Women’s Wing registered with him, and then he went, ‘Heh! You’re over the fucking rainbow, mate!’ It was seven years ago. No, eight—we’d just moved to Cleaverton. I’d nailed the contract for an Urban Splash development in Ancoats, Shaz was expanding the union membership base like bellows on a water balloon, and the mean Crumpsall rentals were behind us. New house and a new car: we used to run it up to the Lakes for dirty weekends, Windermere, screw on floral bedspreads in B&Bs with views of the Langdale Pikes. One day, then, I’d had a downswing— two sparks hadn’t showed, a big invoice was overdue, and Shaz refused to skip out on some  

 

 

 

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bullshit hearing to spot me a sympathy pint. So I’d said, fuck you, and I’d gone instead, alone, to a matinee screening of The Wizard of Oz. The multiplex on Peter Street used to run these showings of classic talkies aimed at pensioners, cups of tea thrown in and little three-packs of bourbon creams. Judy Garland, Frank Morgan, a gobful of biscuits? Sorted. Only one other punter had been loitering in the foyer that day: this balding, tubby, sheepish bloke, hands shoved deep in his pockets, muttering or humming to himself until he caught my eye. ‘Merry Old Land of Oz, eh,’ he’d said, with an embarrassed guffaw, and then he’d frowned at me and his face bloomed scarlet. ‘Hey—Conor, isn’t it? From Cleaverton? On Lasseter?’ I’d frowned back. ‘Uh,’ I’d said. ‘Conn, actually.’ His features shifted slowly from idler to neighbour. ‘Ed, right?’ ‘Yeah! Yeah. Number sixty-three.’ We’d shaken sweaty hands. I didn’t know what else to say. I remembered thinking that it wasn’t, like, dignified: two grown men, The Wizard of Oz. Then Eddie had said, in a rush, ‘I mean, but, wouldn’t you fucking love to go to Oz? I would. Magic. Snap your fingers. Imagine it. No worries at all. Whatever your heart desired.’ I’d nodded. ‘Roast beef every Tuesday.’ ‘Three-ply bog roll with pictures on it in the downstairs loo.’ ‘Fuck it,’ I’d said, ‘we’d put in a downstairs loo.’ We’d skipped the movie and gotten plastered at the foyer bar, and then stumbled down to the Portland Street McDonalds to invest in a brace of nine-piece Chicken McNugget boxes to scoff on the bus home—we weren’t simpletons, we valued our rations. Upstairs on the 197, traversing the Grosvenor Street-Oxford Road junction, Eddie had stuck his head out over the stairwell, retched hard, and brought up half a hen’s worth of masticated chunks of battered processed meat all over the Stagecoach ticket inspector. Booted off, stranded, stinking and giddy,  

 

 

 

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we’d stomped through the Infirmary grounds arm-in-arm, bellowing, ‘Because, because, because, BECAUSE, BECAUSE—’ I remember straddling an abandoned gurney in the staff carpark and egging him on as he tried to wrench open the back door of an ambulance; the pair of us, middle-aged, screeching abuse at this befuddled young paramedic: ‘Open the taxi! The magic fucking taxi, see? We’ve got monkeys! We’ve got flying—fucking—monkeys!’ ‘I hate hospitals,’ said Eddie, now, morosely. ‘And doctors. You know Em’s Da’s a GP? Christmas round theirs—it’s brutal. Nothing but bowel movement analysis and yoga. Yoga.’ ‘I’m only trying to—’ ‘They never liked me. Shower of miserable Brummies.’ ‘—cheer you up.’ ‘Yeah?’ He scoffed. ‘What are you, Marty Mc-bloody-Fly?’ He sighed. ‘Fuck it, Conn, maybe you should talk to her. I don’t know. She likes you. Or, at least, she’s not threating to castrate you, anyway.’ He paused, doubled over with his hands on his thighs, coughed, and spat a thick clog of phlegm onto the footpath, then straightened to resume his pained, uneven stride. I followed at a slight distance. She liked me? Emily Brown liked me. I was sore, my heels and ankles and little toes blistering and the back of my throat near raw, but I felt buoyed, the beneficiary of an unlikely gush of optimism and energy. I craved a drink—a toast!—but we’d finished the last of Eddie’s cans as we’d passed the crater once occupied by the BBC studios. Now, though, on the cusp of Rusholme, I recognised a narrow ginnel between two falafel joints. I trotted faster and caught Eddie by the elbow. ‘Here,’ I said, ‘I’ll spot you,’ and I led him through to a dilapidated run of shops opposite a terrace of student houses. A late-night pharmacy, a shuttered newsagents, and—ta da!—a poorly stocked off-license. I spent the last of my week’s wages on two more six-packs and a packet of Fox’s Glacier Mints.  

 

 

 

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‘Look,’ said Eddie when I came out. ‘It’s an omen.’ He was staring up at the newsagent’s blinking neon sign and swaying ever so slightly. The pink tubing spelled out C L O S E D, but the timer was stuttering so that C

D alternated sluggishly with L O S E.

‘See?’ he said. ‘I’m fucked. It’s written.’ ‘You’re a cretin,’ I said. I cracked open a tin each and we drank. * We drank and we moved; we moved and we drank; we reeled along after the rest of the demo’s stragglers, through Fallowfield, through Withington, the night sky bobbing overhead like the underside of a great, speckled whale. We drank as we tottered down the Curry Mile, through a foggy tunnel of grilled mutton, batter and lard, paneer, jellied sweets, turmeric. And the more we drank, the more blubberingly affectionate we became: ‘You know I fucking love you,’ said Eddie, ‘you worthless cunt.’ ‘Course you do, you useless prick.’ I felt a surge of violent, guilty endearment for him and his trundling moves: the bandy stride, like a bantam chicken’s, sneaky and darting despite the heft of him and the expansive torso; those scrawny arms and legs; and his stewed, cockeyed posture— ‘Stop it!’ he said. ‘What’s so fucking funny? Conn?’ My chuckle turned into a spluttering, choking wheeze. ‘Nothing!’ I croaked. But, quick as that, the mood had shifted: Eddie became jumpy and fearful; he kept patting his pockets before he’d remember what he’d done with his phone; he lapsed into a sullen silence. For a while, though—if for me alone—boozy farce prevailed: the curbs kept springing up to threaten us with collapse, and, as in a video game, I kept foiling them. I was Super Mario and greasy-haired Eddie was Luigi: while I stayed upright, he went down hard, twice, three times.  

 

 

 

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He’d stripped off his jacket and his thin shirt, and the thermal vest underneath was a sodden ruck of cotton and perspiration. I could see the slickness of his skin and where his flabby upper arms were damp, both elbows grazed from the falls. He refused, sullenly, to put the jacket on, and finally my patience curdled. ‘Right!’ I halted beside the payphone at the junction where the redeveloped confusion of Wilmslow Road hitched itself to the better-heeled Palatine Road: ‘Give us fifty pee to call a cab—I’m bringing you home.’ ‘No! You fuck.’ He grabbed my arm—I shoved him back and he lurched sideways over the bonnet of an idling Toyota Yaris, landing, winded, on his knees in the drain, while the poor driver gobbed like a barbed fish behind her windscreen. ‘For God’s sake,’ I said. ‘You think Emily wants some dirty prick who’s just crawled out of the bloody gutter?’ ‘Would you shut the fuck up?’ he said, panting. ‘Like you know what she wants!’ He was slurring badly, and wobbling as he got to his feet, but he was away again as soon as he was up, striding across the road with an ugly slopping hobble, the flab bouncing over the rim of his slacks as he tilted towards the upcoming footpath and careered blindly down Palatine. ‘Eddie,’ I yelled, ‘come on,’ but he didn’t look back: ‘Edward Philip Brown,’ I roared, ‘do you think I’m running after you?’ But of course I ran after him: Emily would hardly continue to like me, I reasoned, if I let her husband—estranged or otherwise—fall in front of a lorry. So I lumbered as fast as I could in his backwash, rapidly sobering, head down, mindful of the terrain—rickety paving slabs, whorls of dog-shit, shallow pools of rainwater that might well be urine—fearful of mishap and paying little heed to the scene directly ahead of me, until I rear-ended Eddie and almost brought the pair of us down to the deck. He was scrabbling with the flies of his trousers.  

 

 

 

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‘What are you doing?’ I demanded. ‘Need a piss, don’t I? Doesn’t that suit you?’ ‘Not out here, it doesn’t!’ We weren’t in Fallowfield any more: this was deepest Didsbury, gargantuan pillar-fronted houses looming over us like Imax 3D film effects, arc-lit lawns flush as green paint. ‘Suit yourself,’ said Eddie, and he placed his hands flat on the closest garden wall, a hipheight, mossy, granite fortification, and heaved himself, with a protracted, heroic grunt, upwards. I watched, horrified, as he pitched over to the other side. Head first, like a log tumbling over the lip of a falls—down he went, the mossy crown of the wall scraping onto his t-shirt, the filthy soles of his shoes flipping up towards me. I heard a thump, the splintery crunch of shrubbery squashed, a vegetative squelch. ‘Oomph!’ ‘Eddie! Jesus! Ed!’ I rushed to the wall and leaned over. He was on his knees in a muddy flowerbed, fumbling with the rest of his trousers’ buttons. His fingers were red and chafed, too clumsy to work the buttonholes. ‘Come on,’ he muttered, and bent his head lower towards his groin. ‘Eddie, get up!’ I hissed, ‘you’re in somebody’s garden!’ What was he doing? What if the owner of the house came out—a psychopathic hedge-fund manager in a wax jacket, toting a shotgun? We weren’t savages! ‘We’re not savages,’ I cried. ‘Eddie, do you hear me?’ He sat down on the ground with an aggrieved sigh. He was—he wasn’t! No, oh God, he was—he was taking off his shoes and socks. He sniffed his left foot. The front lawn was illuminated by interlocking circles of luminescent lamp-light, and I could see the foot as well as he could, better than I’d have liked: a greyish slab of sodden flesh that must have smelled like a primordial shower curtain. Releasing it, he sighed again, and lay back. Lay down! In the dirt! In the freezing wet cold, in somebody’s garden—  

 

 

 

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I was whining: ‘Get up! Get up, you idiot, Eddie, please, you can’t do this to me—’ He wasn’t quite foetal, but lolling to the side, curling in on himself, taking shallow, wheezy breaths. After an endless moment during which I prayed, I fucking prayed he’d come to his senses, I too climbed over the wall, my fingernails clawing for purchase at the moist hunks of moss that came away under my hands like waterlogged plaster. I leaped awkwardly down, my left hip catching painfully on the rim of the stonework, and landed in a jarred heap beside him. His clothes, he’d wet himself, the smell— ‘Oh, man,’ I said, ‘it's all over your pants, Eddie. Stand up, will you?’ No reaction. His eyes were half-lidded. I crouched and heaved him up; digging my hands in under his shoulders, I hauled him to a sitting position where he coughed, shuddered violently, and vomited a thin gruel all over his lap. ‘Oh, shit,’ I cried, and I let go in disgust. Immediately cursing myself, I tried to grab him again, but I was too slow; I snatched, ridiculously, at his hair, which slipped greasily through my moss-slicked fingers. Eddie’s skull smacked off the stone-rimmed edge of the flowerbed. * For too long, I couldn’t breathe; ensnared in a web of blank, strangling panic, my mind flapped, airlessly, dizzy, registering only his pallor, his limpness, before my lungs opened and I gasped, and I thought, finally, to drop my head to his chest and listen: ———da-dum———da-dum——— ‘Oh, thank God. Oh, my God.’ I stayed slumped beside him for a minute, my knees pressing down into the loam, my ear to his expansive chest, thinking, saved, we’re saved—but seconds later I was up again, berating myself: ‘Well, fucking do something, you fucking idiot!’ An ambulance. The hospital. Drips, oxygen masks, nurses calling Eddie pet—Jesus. No. I closed my eyes and saw him rearing up, orderlies shouting, tubes ripped free from his orifices,  

 

 

 

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lashing me, pinkish fluid spraying over my face whilst he thundered abuse, you fuck, you cunt, you sent me here— I was shuddering. I didn’t know what to do, what to think, where to turn. Long minutes passed before my scurrying, overwrought brain remembered: Shaz. I rose up. I found my phone in my bag; I swept my arm about, circling, in search of a signal, and, as soon as two meagre bars appeared, the battery icon flashed rapidly and the whole thing shut itself down: neat, efficient, heartless. Okay, I thought; okay. Don’t worry. ‘Okay,’ I repeated, aloud. ‘Eddie? I’ll get help. I’m getting help. I promise. So, just, don’t fucking move, all right? You hear me?’ I scrambled back over the wall. I got maybe ten lurching yards down the road—ten grotesquely slow yards, every nerve-ending in my spine and my skull registering each juddering, thumping step—before I realised, of course, that I had no idea where Shaz was, and that I couldn’t just leave Eddie there—what if he got hypothermia? What if he got attacked—mugged, raped, killed? This sent me scuttling back to the garden to make sure his heart hadn’t stopped. It hadn’t; he moaned very faintly as he exhaled. I was feeling queasy and tearful. Possibly he was just exhausted—drunk and overwhelmed—but it wasn’t unlikely, was it, that, after the impact— thanks to the impact—he’d had some sort of attack, a rupture, something to do with his ulcer, his asthma, a heart attack? It wasn’t unheard of at his age—at our age. Or what if he’d had a stroke? What did I know? It was my fault he was here; I’d invited him, I’d loaded him up, I’d made this happen. I imagined the headline:

FAT LOCAL DIES IN PROTEST STUNT: ACCOMPLICE DETAINED, MANSLAUGHTER.  

 

 

 

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Okay, I thought. Okay, okay, okay. I started groping though my bag again, looking for God knows what, anything that might make a difference: spare socks, a Mars Bar, the marathon emergency kit, a grey Dulux colour chart listing string and cave and warm dust. Eddie’s supplies weren’t much better: the plastic loops from the six-packs, his headlamp, his work tie— The emergency kit! I tore open the wrapping and shook out the silver blanket; I draped it over Eddie and tucked the edges underneath his legs and arms. There! But the flesh beneath his shoulder-blades gave too easily, like bin-bags full of compost, and when I stepped back to look at him, it—he—looked like a corpse that had been bundled incompetently, suspiciously, inside a carpet. The more I fiddled with it, the stupider it looked and the dirtier and more rattled I became. I started to freak: I was fucked. Eddie was fucked. I would have to tell Emily. I got Eddie wasted and very nearly killed him— She was bound to blame me. Why wouldn’t she? I dropped to my knees on the grass, in the semi-darkness, my vertebrae pulsating with pain; I screeched, ‘Could somebody just help us?’ ‘Um—hel-lo?’ I looked up, flummoxed. From the other side of the wall, a teenage girl was gawking at me. At us. Well—at Eddie. ‘Is he dead?’ ‘No! Of course he’s not—’ I stopped. Pudgy arms and calves, a denim jacket at least one size too small, the empty wayfarers, the cap: ‘You—you’re Shaz’s, what is it, intern!’ I was on my feet, now, pointing. ‘I saw you! You were there. Izzy! Izzy—where’s Shaz?’ Izzy frowned. ‘And you’re—’ ‘I’m her husband! I’m Conn! Please, my friend, he’s—’ She stared at the Eddie-shaped lump in the flowerbed. ‘You want me to call, like, an ambulance?’  

 

 

 

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‘Yes! No, I mean, no—Eddie, he’s phobic, he’d fucking kill me, wouldn’t he?’ I paused to think. I was reeling. ‘I don’t know. I have to see Emily. His—Em, she’s—she’ll know what—’ My voice was too high-pitched. I took a breath. ‘I need a lift. Okay? We need a lift. Shaz can get us a ride—see?’ She cocked her head. The oversized, useless glasses cast huge, looping shadows over her face as she studied me. ‘Aren’t you the one that lost the strike opinion polls?’ ‘What? That was a fucking accident!’ ‘I’m not even on duty,’ she muttered, but she started to tap out a rapid message on her phone. She waited. I waited. Waited! I couldn’t stand this. ‘Can’t you just call her?” Izzy looked amazed. ‘Terry says, never tie up the line? Unless it’s like, an absolute emergency?’ ‘But—’ I shook my head. ‘Who the fuck is Terry?’ ‘Terry Foster? Are you serious? I—’ She broke off as her phone beeped. ‘You’re lucky. They’re passing this way. Are you really Sharon’s husband?’ ‘Am I—oh, Jesus.’ I hunkered back down beside Eddie and laid a tender hand on his feebly rising chest. * ‘Conn? What the actual fuck?’ A white van had slowed to idle on the curb. I leaped—tottered—up, my legs buckling, the left calf cramping, the right foot now completely numb. ‘Shaz!’ My wife was leaning out the driver’s window, bundled in a parka, her hair bound in an old scarf of mine. She looked sapped—bloodless, reedy. Her voice was cracked. ‘Have you any  

 

 

 

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fucking idea how worried I’ve been? No sign of you, no phone call—you know you’re an hour behind the last of the stragglers?’ ‘Yeah, but—’ ‘I thought you’d gone. I thought you’d fucked off and left me.’ She narrowed her eyes. ‘You’re filthy. What—’ ‘Sharon!’ We both jumped. There was a woman beside her, in the passenger seat—fiftyish, hair pinned tightly back from a severe face, a hands-free phone-headset clamped over the crown of her head. She rapped Shaz on the shoulder with a Parker pen. ‘Listen,’ she announced. ‘Phil says he’s got two shadows MPs offering support, and that’s on top of the Gorton and Tameside councillors. He’s on hold now with an AP at the Politics Show—we need to get to the Quays pronto.’ Her gaze slid briefly over me without a flicker of interest. ‘Sharon! Are you listening?’ ‘Yes! Yes, of course.’ Shaz raked her fingers over her face. ‘Okay. Uh—Terry, this is Conn, my husband? Conn, Terry—Teresa Foster. My PR consultant.’ ‘Great, wow,’ I said, disoriented, ‘but, Shaz—what about Eddie?’ ‘Eddie?’ ‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘he’s sort of—hurt.’ Izzy piped up. ‘Yeah, so there’s, like, a guy? Down there?’ Shaz looked at her. ‘What do you mean, down there?’ Teresa leaned over the gear-stick and fastened us all with a nail-gun stare. ‘Is there a problem, Sharon? Are we delayed? Is there a goddamned problem?’ ‘He fell,’ I said, ‘he whacked his head—he was taking a slash, you know, and then he sort of sat down in the dirt, and I tried getting him up, but he’s fucking heavy, man—you know—and I, he, his head went, you know, clunk, off the floor. He’s alive,’ I added. ‘He’s not dead.’  

 

 

 

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‘And of course you didn’t call a doctor.’ Shaz was already dialling. ‘You just sat there, dithering. Right?’ ‘No,’ I retorted, ‘no, you know what he’s like, you know he hates doctors! I need to get him home, is all. I need a lift, Shaz. Please.’ She looked up. ‘That’s the stupidest—’ ‘Sharon!’ Teresa was curt. ‘Tick-tock.’ ‘Please, Shaz!’ ‘I think he’s, like, breathing,’ added Izzy. ‘Oh, Christ! Fine!’ Shaz tossed her phone, with some force, into the footwell. ‘All right! Go on, then! Get him in the back!’ Teresa said, ‘Sharon!’ ‘Well, I’m sorry, Terry,’ Shaz snapped, ‘but what am I supposed to do? Leave him on the side of the street like a pancaked fucking hedgehog?’ She turned to Izzy. ‘Do something, will you?” ‘Ugh,’ said Izzy, but she vaulted over the wall with enviable ease. She nodded at me. ‘Can you, like, get that end?’ I waddled obediently towards the head, my own body an excruciating aggregation of woe, stress and exhaustion. My chest cavity was flooding with cold anxiety; I was thinking, Emily, Eddie, Emily— We levered him up; I hooked his armpits so that his skull pressed against my torso and his chin tilted down onto his breastbone. He looked fatter, slacker and sadder than ever. A soft pouch of lard, a sheaf of brittle twigs. It took an age to shuffle around to the garden gate and then back to the van, Izzy grunting with exasperation at my geriatric pace, at Eddie’s flaccid, sagging immensity. I felt more and more depressed. He could be bleeding internally for all I knew, he could be on his way out. However fed-up Emily was, however badly he’d treated her,  

 

 

 

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she’d not want him to suffer death in the back of a hired transit van, and she’d not thank me for enabling it. ‘Dear God,’ said Teresa, ‘he’s like a barbequed potato.’ She banged on the partition between the van’s cab and the cargo hold. ‘You’ve got fifteen minutes.’ * To Cleaverton—finally. Shaz sliced into each street-corner, the rear of the van skidding wildly, its assorted contents—unpaired trainers, bike lights, torn emergency blankets, hundreds of tattered flyers, Izzy, Eddie, me—sliding and bumping from one side of the hold to the other. I tried to brace Eddie against the partition wall to keep him from flopping around. His belly splurged out gently and whitely from under the hem of his shirt where the emergency blanket had come untucked. Izzy, pale with carsickness, averted her eyes. ‘Uh, so,’ she said, ‘is it true that you really didn’t know Terry?’ ‘What? No. I mean, yes.’ ‘Well. She’s amazing. I mean, she could have gotten, like, that dude Osama the Nobel. Only, he, uh, died, didn’t he?’ She sounded almost wistful. ‘And, what—she’s working with you lot? With the union? What for?’ ‘She’s working with Sharon. She says she can frame her as this, you know, people’s champion? For the Council campaign, like. Terry has all the contacts, she—’ ‘Hang on,’ I said. ‘No. Shaz isn’t running for Council.’ ‘Of course she—’ The van bounced over a speed bump, and Izzy’s head jerked back and clunked off the metal wall. Her kitschy glasses fell off. ‘Ow!’ ‘I mean,’ I said, and the van pitched to the left and I wedged my foot against Eddie’s side to hold him in place. ‘I mean—I’d know about that. Not you. Me.’ Izzy touched her head and winced. ‘Whatever.’  

 

 

 

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Well, of course I’d fucking know, I thought, but I was too tired to properly stabilize myself against the wall, never mind to quarrel. Instead, I tried to calculate exactly where we were, tallying each rattling corner to plot our slewing course along the potholed South Manchester roads, towards Cleaverton and its shining arterial parade of neon-lit deep-fried-chicken shops and marble-fronted banqueting halls, towards relief, towards Emily. But with each shock of the van’s scant suspension, all I heard was the smack, again, of my friend’s skull off the flowerbed curb. * ‘Out! Out!’ The van jounced sideways onto the footpath. There was a thump from behind the partition panel and Teresa barked, ‘Two minutes! Two minutes and we’re gone!’ I crawled to the rear door and pulled it open. A bolt of streetlight shot across the floor and struck Eddie’s expressionless face. Izzy wrinkled her nose. ‘Ew.’ ‘Hey,’ I said, galled, but then I caught a gust of the reeking mix of urine and vomit that must have kicked her straight in the snout as Eddie, stirring, dislodged the blanket and further exposed his sluiced lap. ‘Ed! Eddie, man,’ I cried, scrambling back to his side, ‘it’s me, can you hear me?’ ‘Can I—? Ow—oh, bollocks.’ He groaned and put his hand to the side of his head. It came away smeared with blood. ‘Conn? What the—?’ ‘That’s nothing! You’re grand—look at you!’ I gripped his wrist. ‘Come on, but. We have to get out.’ ‘Get out?’ ‘Swing your legs over—that’s it.’  

 

 

 

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I helped him, protesting, out onto the footpath. At this hour, the street—our street, Lasseter Grove—looked forsaken: a tight cul-de-sac of ill-kept terraces cladded in rust-coloured shingles on the upper floors and rendered below in grey, rimy cement. The Browns’ plastic wheelie bins formed a dingy tricolour picket outside their sitting-room window. A dim orange glow lit up the first-floor window. ‘Right!’ I said, and hoisted my tracksuit bottoms decisively. Eddie stared at me. He looked appalling: pallid skin, the hair poking out at wild angles, the scalp visibly caked with semi-dried blood. ‘What—why are we here? I’m not—I told you, man, I need space.’ He tried to pull me back from the front step. We tussled for a moment—two stout, wearied men struggling like a pair of feeble walruses—until I gave in. ‘Fine!’ I cried. ‘Do what you like! Piss about until you’re found dead on the fucking street! You think you haven’t put her through enough?’ ‘What?’ I didn’t really know what. My head ached; my bones hurt. I needed to see her; that was all. I lurched forward and banged on the door. Almost simultaneously, the horn of the truck sounded, and Shaz called out, ‘Conn! I have to go!’ ‘Would you please just give us one minute?’ I screamed back. Lights started coming on in houses up and down the road as she leant on the button. Beeeep, beeeep— Eddie: ‘Jesus, man, this is fucked—let’s just go. Please.’ He was backing away. Wait, I thought, just wait— And then the door opened: Emily. She stood rigid, red-eyed and spectacular, in the hallway, framed by the cream anaglyptic wallpaper and the downtrodden carpet, wearing a sheer  

 

 

 

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pink dressing gown over Daffy Duck print pyjamas. The skin around her blue eyes was waterlogged and her loose, uncombed hair was gathered in wet clumps behind her ears. I exhaled. ‘Em—’ ‘What did I fucking tell you?’ She was glaring at Eddie. ‘You just don’t get it, do you? You think I’m not serious? Well, here!’ ‘Emily,’ he said, ‘just, please, listen—’ but she’d picked up a bulging refuse sack from behind the door and tossed it at him. He stepped forward mechanically to catch it, and as the hall-light clipped him, I saw Em take in the blood. The cruddy gash, the stench—she blanched as he moved towards her, broken, stinking like a compost heap on the tiny strip of paving that passed for a Cleaverton front yard. ‘Lookit,’ he said, ‘I’m sorry. ‘I am. You know I am. I fucked up. You don’t need to, like, do this. ’ She shook her head. ‘Christ, Ed—’ ‘But it wasn’t anything! She’s, I mean, Em, she’s—it was nothing, yeah? It wasn’t anything—was it, Conn?’ ‘What?’ I said. ‘I mean, I don’t, I wasn’t—’ ‘She’s my fucking sister, Eddie,’ she said. ‘How—seriously, how is that nothing?’ ‘But you’re not being fair!’ He was whinging. He hobbled closer. ‘I love you. I’ve tried. I’ve tried really hard. It was one time.’ He pushed me to one side and put his hand on the doorknob. ‘And that’s supposed to be all right, is it? Like, a free pass for friends and family? Get out, Ed. Don’t be a dumb fuck—just go, will you?’ Except that he didn’t budge, so she had to reach out and push him. Incapacitated, enfeebled, he fell backwards, banged into the gatepost and dropped the bag, which burst, spilling ripped t-shirts and faded red underpants and plaid pyjama-bottoms all over the cracked concrete slabs.  

 

 

 

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Eddie swore. He crouched, trying to bundle it all back together—as though that would somehow help—and, as if on cue, Shaz revved the engine. ‘Conn,’ she called, ‘get in the fucking van!’ ‘Would you hold on,’ I yelled; Emily was already closing the door. I rammed my hand into the gap, forcing her to stop. ‘Em,’ I said, rapidly. Quietly. ‘Wait, please, listen.’ She raised her head to me, said nothing, but the taut set of her swollen face was a brusque what? Well—what? I ought to have confessed, I knew that, to tell her about Eddie and his fall and my part in it, and to plead for him, too; to catalogue his agitation and contrition and to entreat her on his behalf: to be a friend. I glanced back at him—scrabbling ludicrously in the dirt—and I opened my mouth, but—nothing. I licked my lips. The moment drew out and thinned; everything slowed. I was, as Shaz would say, dithering. Here was Emily, beautiful and almost, finally, free. But there, behind me, was Eddie—unbound, hopeless, luckless—and, behind him, Shaz, as heavily familiar as the indecision that tethered me to the doorstep. Like her, I raked my face and went, ‘Okay.’ ‘Okay, what?’ ‘Just—’ I stepped over the threshold and thrust my face at hers. A quick fiasco of stubble and spittle; she recoiled. ‘What the fuck, Conn?’ ‘Well,’ I said, ‘you know—I love you.’ ‘You love me? Are you out of your mind?’ ‘No,’ I said, indignantly, but she started to weep and I felt suddenly confused; I took a half-step back onto the doorstep, repelled by the force of her keening. ‘Em,’ I went. ‘Please.’ ‘You knew,’ she said, in a strangled burst, ‘you fucking knew—all year, you knew what he did and you said nothing, and now, what, you love me?’  

 

 

 

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‘Well,’ I said, ‘yeah—’ ‘Get off my fucking doorstep,’ she went, ‘you lying cock,’ and she slammed shut the door. I took an obedient, shocked step backwards. ‘Right,’ I managed, ‘sure.’ But I was trembling. Okay, I’d known—of course I’d known. Yet if I’d told her—well, I’d have lost them both, wouldn’t I? Emily and Eddie. So what was I supposed to have done? But—another step back—what had I expected of tonight? Really? A click of her heels and a kiss and we’d both be lifted out of the stale endlessness of, oh, everything? Conn the Consoler? And a resigned handshake from Eddie? I stood there teetering—a year’s fantasy deflating around me—and I started to wonder if I wasn’t, in fact, out of my mind. After all, I felt like keening, too, for what I’d lost, though the actual structure of that loss didn’t ratchet into focus until I turned to see Eddie staring at me, no longer footling about by the bins, but sniffing and wiping his nose with the soggy, soil-encrusted sleeve of his coat. ‘Ed,’ I said, horrified, but he just stared, the awful moment stretching, weakening, until I split it wide open: ‘So, I better, uh, go,’ I gabbled, ‘I’ll see you later, mate, yeah?’ And I looked around, hurriedly, to signal to Shaz that I was ready. But she’d already slipped the van into gear. It—they, she—was twenty yards gone, angling towards the main road. ‘Shaz!’ I yelled. ‘Shaz, Jesus, here!’ But she didn’t wait. Of course she didn’t. Wait for what? For her husband to finish setting his cap at his best friend’s wife? For him to slump back into his marriage like he’d tug back on a pair of dirty pants when nobody was looking? All I could see in the passenger-side wing-mirror was a frosty slice of Teresa’s face and an obscure blur that might, maybe, have been a sliver of my wife’s arm. Eddie had turned away. The loneliness clouted me—is still clouting me—like a brick to the jaw. Eddie, Shaz: the possibilities snapped like elastic bands—love, hope,  

 

 

 

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the whole fucking beautiful world and all its tenderness catapulting out of my reach, shooting after the spinning back wheels of the Transit van— ‘I’m here,’ I screamed, ‘I’m here, I’m here, I’m fucking here!’

 

[END]